How to Personalize Customer Service as a Small Business

While large corporations are everywhere, Americans tend to prefer working with smaller businesses whenever possible.

Small businesses are seen as more accessible. They aren’t bound by rigid policies that don’t make sense like corporations, and they’re often perceived as being heavily involved in the local communities. Customers often trust them more and feel more invested in the business itself. One study even found that 90% of Americans hold favorable views of small businesses, and only 61% said the same about corporations. 

Running your own small business means that you get to do things your way, and that includes your brand’s customer service. 

Offering customer service that’s personalized to each individual customer and tailored to your specific business is a great way to set yourself apart from the competition and exceed your clients’ expectations. In this post, we’re going to take a close look at exactly how you can do this to improve retention rates and bolster your brand reputation.

Set General Guidelines Your Team Can Use to Make Decisions 

Small businesses have an immediate advantage when it comes to customer service in that they typically aren’t bound to the same strict rules that large corporations have to keep things regulated.

It is possible to take things case-by-case, coming up with more personalized solutions for each individual problem as your team sees fit.

In order to take advantage of this perk, a lot of businesses find that it’s useful to set up basic guidelines for their customer service team to use as a suggested framework but to give them the tools and autonomy needed to make decisions on their own.

You may have a general policy, for example, that all missing deliveries are reshipped instead of being issued a refund, but allow your customer service team members to decide when to offer a refund as a solution to specific customers. 

Use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

When your customers call with a question, concern, or complaint, it can be helpful to understand who they are and what their relationship with your brand is. 

A VIP client who has been a big purchaser for years, for example, would likely appreciate some recognition of their value to your brand and may also have higher expectations for service. Being able to identify these clients quickly is important. 

A frustrated customer who has reached out about the same issue they’re calling about now on two separate occasions would likely become even more annoyed if you offered the same solution you had before. A quick review of the customer in your CRM system could show you past customer complaints and steps taken previously to resolve the solution.

There are tons of great solutions out there. Hubspot is a popular one, and Salesforce is great, but there are plenty of tools that come with a variety of different features and price points. Take some time to find one that works for your business. 

Go Where Your Customers Are

This is a facet of customer service that is sometimes overlooked.

Personalized customer support isn’t just about finding great solutions, but it’s also about being where your customers want to reach you.

Phone support is still a major priority; many customers still prefer to talk to a representative over the phone, especially about urgent or sensitive matters. Hubspot research shows 48% of customers want to use the phone for customer service - over live chat and “contact us” forms.

Phone support shouldn’t be the only form of communication you offer, however. Set up live chat on your site, or at least have a fast-response email option. You should also be checking your social media profiles daily for incoming messages and public comments to ensure that you aren’t missing any communications from your customers. 

Take Advantage of Third-Party Support 

Offering personalized support does take more time than simply going by the books without customizing solutions to your individual customers.

If you’re struggling to manage this bandwidth with your internal team, the good news is that there are tools that can help with this. 

Reliable, high-quality answering services are often a great solution when you’re struggling to keep up with the influx of calls and you don’t want to rush interactions with your customers. Having extra external team members ready to answer the phone means that you won’t have to sacrifice on call quality or quantity, which is essential.

Hiring an answering service like PATLive, for example, can offer customer service to your customers exactly as you would. (Plus a lot of other great benefits too) We take the time to learn about how your business functions and how you handle customer calls. 

We can tackle a brunt of the incoming calls for you, doing everything from collecting lead information to processing payments. And if there’s ever a customer service concern we can’t address, we’ll patch them through to the right team member right away. 

Personalized customer service is becoming an expectation; it’s no longer necessarily extraordinary in its own right. This means that you must be adapting, offering outstanding service that’s tailored to your customer base, giving them the “small business experience” in all the right ways.

If you ever feel overwhelmed with customer support needs, remember that there are plenty of tools you can turn to. CRM software, for example, makes customer relationship management much easier, and social media management tools allow you to monitor and respond to incoming messages quickly. Live answering services like PATLive can also take an enormous burden off your staff, allowing us to help you deliver outstanding service to your customers even when your hands are full. 

Source: https://www.patlive.com/blog/personalize-customer-service/

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Analytics

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1.)	3Fiftynine CardBoard CardBoard: Real-time data, shows the most important KPI’s in your Contact Center. Built for data | Designed for business | Empowers teams

2.)

Acqueon Technologies Inc. Acqueon's AI-driven conversational engagement software enables sales, marketing and service organizations to engage in emotionally connected dialogs with customers via their channel of choice for significantly improved results. The Acqueon suite adds multichannel campaign management, contact center analytics, desktop, and CRM connectors for your contact center software of choice, including Amazon Connect, Cisco, Nice inContact, and Twilio. Acqueon conversational engagement software leverages the Acqueon IQ platform to aggregate data from the various applications, assemble rich customer contexts, and drive next-best-action using powerful statistical and predictive models.

3.)

Alvaria Noble IQ Turn business insights into actionable intelligence. Noble’s IQsolutions provide you with rich and robust customer data that can transform your business. Automate decision making and campaign management and refine the quality of interactions with precision and efficiency. We have developed proprietary and patented tools to help you make sense of data on your current operations and then help you make strategic decisions to improve performance and efficiency. Identify who your best customers and prospects are and the ideal methods to reach them. Understand what types of campaigns work best for your business and how to optimize underperforming campaigns. And nake real-time decisions rather than looking back to see what went wrong.

4.)

BPA Quality Call Center Quality Monitoring Outsourced call center quality solutions including Multi-lingual, Multi-Channel Quality Monitoring, Call Center Consulting, Psychometrics & Analysis of Customer-Agent Interactions, Cloud-based Quality Analysis Software configured by Needs, Virtual & In-person Training, Speech Analytics & Speech Analytics Management.

5.)

Call Tracking Metrics Automate insights from all your customer communications There's no better way to get to know your customer than through their own communications with your brand. Gain a strategic advantage and a thorough understanding of your customer's full journey with a complete suite of conversation intelligence tools and features. Measure customer sentiment, automatically identify and score qualified conversations, and give strategists everything they need to knock their campaigns out of the park. Use conversation analytics to: • Build your ideal customer profile • Optimize your sales and customer service processes • Maximize your resources to focus on quality conversations • Identify trends and customer sentiment in real-time

6.)

CallFinder CallFinder speech analytics CallFinder® is a leading provider of cloud-based SaaS speech analytics, automated call scoring, and speech-to-text transcription technology with sentiment analysis. Our easy-to-use solution is designed to help businesses and contact centers automate quality monitoring to improve agent performance and provide a superior customer experience. With CallFinder, you get… 100% visibility into agent-customer interactions 100% monitoring of interactions, up from only 5-10% Scalability of QA reviews with the same size QA team CallFinder isn’t just your average speech analytics provider. When you work with us, you get unparalleled, continuous support through our MyAnalyst managed client servic... (read more)CallFinder® is a leading provider of cloud-based SaaS speech analytics, automated call scoring, and speech-to-text transcription technology with sentiment analysis. Our easy-to-use solution is designed to help businesses and contact centers automate quality monitoring to improve agent performance and provide a superior customer experience. With CallFinder, you get… 100% visibility into agent-customer interactions 100% monitoring of interactions, up from only 5-10% Scalability of QA reviews with the same size QA team CallFinder isn’t just your average speech analytics provider. When you work with us, you get unparalleled, continuous support through our MyAnalyst managed client services with tailored, one-on-one training and guidance. Our analysts assist in transforming your manual Quality Monitoring processes into automatically delivered scorecards, transcripts, and reports that measure key business metrics to help you manage your business and contact center operations.

7.)

ComSys S.A. CCube for Business Intelligence CCube by Comsys is a business intelligence application, developed for enterprise contact centers. It delivers powerful, and dynamic reporting that enable managers to gain insight into their business. CCube is natively compatible with Aspect Unified IP and Cisco Unified Contact Center (UCCE/UCCX) platforms Comsys is a provider of οmnichannel customer engagement solutions that assist companies around the world in delivering unique customer experiences. For the last 15 years, Comsys designs and implements complex projects for clients from the outsourcing, financial services, telecommunications, and retail sectors. Comsys enjoys strategic partnerships with technology vendors like Cisco®, Aspect... (read more)CCube by Comsys is a business intelligence application, developed for enterprise contact centers. It delivers powerful, and dynamic reporting that enable managers to gain insight into their business. CCube is natively compatible with Aspect Unified IP and Cisco Unified Contact Center (UCCE/UCCX) platforms Comsys is a provider of οmnichannel customer engagement solutions that assist companies around the world in delivering unique customer experiences. For the last 15 years, Comsys designs and implements complex projects for clients from the outsourcing, financial services, telecommunications, and retail sectors. Comsys enjoys strategic partnerships with technology vendors like Cisco®, Aspect Software®, and Microsoft® for the delivery of innovative interaction management and contact center optimization solutions.

8.)

Consilium Software Consilium UniInsight™ The days of ‘business as usual’ are a distant memory for most of the world. And when it comes to contact centers, balancing between contact channels, deciding which agent locations or teams are doing well, working out how your customer satisfaction is being impacted by the less-than-perfect work environments of ‘lockdown’ agents…leaders are often at a loss when trying to get such insights from their contact center data. As the technology and business landscape changes, so too must the contact center reporting and analytics solutions that power decision making and performance management. With the new release of Consilium UniInsight™, we have tried to deliver contact center reporting and op... (read more)The days of ‘business as usual’ are a distant memory for most of the world. And when it comes to contact centers, balancing between contact channels, deciding which agent locations or teams are doing well, working out how your customer satisfaction is being impacted by the less-than-perfect work environments of ‘lockdown’ agents…leaders are often at a loss when trying to get such insights from their contact center data. As the technology and business landscape changes, so too must the contact center reporting and analytics solutions that power decision making and performance management. With the new release of Consilium UniInsight™, we have tried to deliver contact center reporting and operational analytics in a way that will make a meaningful impact on organizations’ ability to optimize performance and deliver exceptional customer experience (CX.) Consilium UniInsight™ is an intuitive business intelligence reporting and analytics solution which can combine data from Cisco and non-Cisco data sources to simplify custom historical and real-time reporting. The purpose of analytics and business intelligence is to provide the tools and best practices for the analysis of information to improve and optimize decisions and performance, and with UniInsight™ we help you get that done with the least amount of stress, and in the shortest possible time. UniInsight™ helps businesses to analyze and track key business metrics in real-time, make changes to the anticipated contact volumes, and thus optimize workforce productivity and customer service SLAs. In most situations, new customized reports and dashboards can be built and run within seconds as we use pre-aggregated, processed data which is optimized for fast results. There is an easy drag-and-drop design for rapid customization of both, reports and dashboards. • DIY custom reports and real-time dashboards to analyze and track key business metrics in real-time, anticipate contact volumes, and optimize workforce productivity. • Integration with multiple data sources using OLAP cubes from multiple data sources for slicing and dicing of data. Online analytical processing (OLAP) provides an optimized environment for multidimensional analysis. • Intuitive report designer tool for ease of creating custom reports and dashboards without the need for the users to know SQL or database schemas.

9.)

CUSTOMER SQUARE CROSSCRM.CX - CRM Dataviz Module CROSS-CRM manages daily interconnection with your CRM tools to centralize data and analyse CX on all channels, and is able to provide deep analytics insights. All the Kpi’S are here for precise control of your Customer Relationship : Interactions - Quality - Satisfaction - Campains forecast MyClient Filters, Data Extraction, Custom Views, dates sheets, email subscriptions, xls Extracts, images, pdf PLUS ! Automated extracts for integration to third party applications.

10.)

Daisee Daisee Daisee builds technology that empowers people to solve problems by making interactions simple and smart so they can have a more significant impact, be more productive and be better at what they do. We believe incremental improvements carry huge potency and provide exponentially greater change for the better. Genesys customers can now automate risk and quality management using Daisee’s speech and sentiment analytics and remediation workflow software. Daisee helps improve customer experience, ensure regulatory compliance, identify missed commercial opportunities & training requirements as well as provide valuable insights back to the business directly from the frontline – the true voice-of-... (read more)Daisee builds technology that empowers people to solve problems by making interactions simple and smart so they can have a more significant impact, be more productive and be better at what they do. We believe incremental improvements carry huge potency and provide exponentially greater change for the better. Genesys customers can now automate risk and quality management using Daisee’s speech and sentiment analytics and remediation workflow software. Daisee helps improve customer experience, ensure regulatory compliance, identify missed commercial opportunities & training requirements as well as provide valuable insights back to the business directly from the frontline – the true voice-of-the-customer. Unlike legacy speech analytics providers that simply transcribe audio to text and use ‘word spotting’ (i.e building a database of synonyms for every use case - ‘angry’ and ‘manager’ as well as ‘upset’ and ‘supervisor’ and simply spotting for those words), the engine has proprietary use of its sentiment language – a University innovation developed at Daisee, resulting in far more accurate transcription, enabling derivation of the context of a conversation. The Programmable Scorecard™ scores every call, and automatically activates a workflow for low-scoring, high-risk calls in near-real-time so they can be immediately reviewed and remediated. As the solution is pre-trained out of the box, deployment is a matter of weeks, not months and there is no setup or professional services fees – just a straightforward SaaS based pricing model. Ensure 100% of your phone interactions are not only monitored but also analyzed and scored with high-risk calls triaged for fast review and remediation.

11.)

DialogTech DialogAnalytics™ Powered by AI, DialogTech’s DialogAnalytics analyzes conversations to provide marketing and sales teams a wealth of insights for smarter optimizations. With the power of conversation intelligence, you can learn which channels, ads, keywords, and webpages drive the best sales calls, if the caller converted, and more. AI analyzes how calls are handled at locations and call centers to detect issues that negatively impact ROI. See what percentage of calls go unanswered and who is best (and worst) at converting callers to appointments and customers. Get email alerts when phone leads are mishandled at locations so those leads can be called back right away. With DialogAnalytics, you can get a... (read more)Powered by AI, DialogTech’s DialogAnalytics analyzes conversations to provide marketing and sales teams a wealth of insights for smarter optimizations. With the power of conversation intelligence, you can learn which channels, ads, keywords, and webpages drive the best sales calls, if the caller converted, and more. AI analyzes how calls are handled at locations and call centers to detect issues that negatively impact ROI. See what percentage of calls go unanswered and who is best (and worst) at converting callers to appointments and customers. Get email alerts when phone leads are mishandled at locations so those leads can be called back right away. With DialogAnalytics, you can get all the pre-call data on the caller and the marketing interaction that drove the call. This helps inform your call routing, the conversations your agents have with customers, and, with AI, your marketing team can analyze conversations to help them take the best actions to drive better quality sales calls to the call center.

12.)

eGain Corporation eGain Analytics eGain Analytics makes it easy to measure, analyze and refine your contact center operations, knowledge and web customer experience. Create informative reports, charts and dashboards effortlessly. Slice-&-dice the data in any number of ways and use it to manage the business effectively. 1. Operational Analytics™ empowers the business to measure and manage the call center directly and without IT involvement. 2. Knowledge Analytics™ provides insight for eGain’s knowledge and AI applications. 3. Digital Analytics™ measures contact center performance within eGain’s digital channel applications. 4. Journey Analytics™ captures customer behavior on the website—identify the churn points and cre... (read more)eGain Analytics makes it easy to measure, analyze and refine your contact center operations, knowledge and web customer experience. Create informative reports, charts and dashboards effortlessly. Slice-&-dice the data in any number of ways and use it to manage the business effectively. 1. Operational Analytics™ empowers the business to measure and manage the call center directly and without IT involvement. 2. Knowledge Analytics™ provides insight for eGain’s knowledge and AI applications. 3. Digital Analytics™ measures contact center performance within eGain’s digital channel applications. 4. Journey Analytics™ captures customer behavior on the website—identify the churn points and create a customer experience that will drive up sales and reduce contacts. All this capability is delivered in a solution that’s easy to deploy, manage, and optimize. Built to work with the award-winning eGain Customer Engagement Hub™, as well as leading Call Center technologies such as Cisco UCCE and Avaya CMS, eGain Analytics provides true omnichannel management.

13.)

eGain Corporation eGain Analytics eGain Analytics makes it easy to measure, analyze and refine your contact center operations, knowledge and web customer experience. Create informative reports, charts and dashboards effortlessly. Slice-&-dice the data in any number of ways and use it to manage the business effectively.

14.)	ethosIQ, LLC ethosAnalytics ethosAnalytics leverages data to provide business intelligence to enhance the customer experience and beyond. The analytics dashboards are customized based on client needs. ethosAnalytics enables data-driven decisions in seconds or minutes - not days or weeks.

15.)

Lieber & Associates Contact center Analytics and Metrics Lieber & Associates provides services to develop, interpret, and improve contact center metrics and analytics. The firm's experience spans forecasting, customer service, order-taking, lead-qualification, sales, segmentation, media-source-tracking, and testing design. L&A's president pioneered segmentation for telephone scripts and the tri-level service level metric. He brings broad analytics experience to contact centers.

16.)

MiaRec, Inc. MiaRec Voice Analytics A powerful new addition to our Customer Engagement Suite, MiaRec Voice Analytics provides a complete quality management solution that records, monitors, organizes, and scores your customer interactions. MiaRec Voice Analytics humanizes your data, empowering you to make real decisions about your customer service operation. Unlock the needs, wants, and concerns of your customer base while upskilling your staff, identifying service gaps, and tackling compliance. Our Voice Analytics solution produces a detailed picture of your call center, highlights the topics you want to see, and helps you get ahead of disputes, reverse churn, and seize emerging business opportunities. With a fast and low l... (read more)A powerful new addition to our Customer Engagement Suite, MiaRec Voice Analytics provides a complete quality management solution that records, monitors, organizes, and scores your customer interactions. MiaRec Voice Analytics humanizes your data, empowering you to make real decisions about your customer service operation. Unlock the needs, wants, and concerns of your customer base while upskilling your staff, identifying service gaps, and tackling compliance. Our Voice Analytics solution produces a detailed picture of your call center, highlights the topics you want to see, and helps you get ahead of disputes, reverse churn, and seize emerging business opportunities. With a fast and low learning curve, MiaRec Voice Analytics builds a custom fit around your operation’s needs and can be updated at any time to track new topics.

17.)

Navedas CSAT.AI CSAT.AI measures if the customer’s questions were answered, how empathetic was your agent and the customer’s sentiment to predict a CSAT score without pesky surveys, all in real time. QA is modernized and the CX game is improved - no matter if your agents are at their home or your office. CSAT.AI automates QA, analyzing 100% of text, email and chat interactions. Without spreadsheets or manual entry, managers have comprehensive data to guide decisions - no need to even be in the same location! CSAT.AI helps you protect your company and your people. Did a customer just threaten to sue you or abuse your agent? Now you know with real time push notifications. CSAT.AI provides granular details by issue (delivery delay etc) or agent score.

18.)

OpsTel Services VIEW With OpsTel VIEW™, you are able to monitor and immediately audit your agent profile data for accuracy and compliance across the entire contact center solution stack. Features: *OpsTel VIEW™ tracks down unused stale profile licenses and provides clients with detailed audits explaining their location, current and historical status *Comprehensive audit across the enterprise, it only takes 10 minute *Provides a view in to the data accuracy of agent profiles across multiple applications *Drastically speeds up audit and validation processes *Validates actions to implement for profile data integrity issues across multiple applications *Can also assist in ensuring access level compliance... (read more)With OpsTel VIEW™, you are able to monitor and immediately audit your agent profile data for accuracy and compliance across the entire contact center solution stack. Features: *OpsTel VIEW™ tracks down unused stale profile licenses and provides clients with detailed audits explaining their location, current and historical status *Comprehensive audit across the enterprise, it only takes 10 minute *Provides a view in to the data accuracy of agent profiles across multiple applications *Drastically speeds up audit and validation processes *Validates actions to implement for profile data integrity issues across multiple applications *Can also assist in ensuring access level compliance for profiles across the enterprise *Out of compliance activity is easily identified through data accuracy

19.)

Pointel CXi - Customer Experience Insights Pointel CXi, the IVR analytics platform, maps the entire customer journey and analyzes calls end-to-end to turn data into actionable insights. Centralized reporting is essential for seamless customer journeys, as it is critical to know where calls are transferred or abandoned. CXi generates multiple reports on IVR performance, the Customer-IVR interactions, and sticking points in the IVR that cause customers to struggle. CXi’s IVR Analytics platform provides a comprehensive understanding of customer engagement. Pointel Customer Experience Insights (CXi) delivers actionable information that enables businesses to reduce customer effort, operational costs and increase contact center effi... (read more)Pointel CXi, the IVR analytics platform, maps the entire customer journey and analyzes calls end-to-end to turn data into actionable insights. Centralized reporting is essential for seamless customer journeys, as it is critical to know where calls are transferred or abandoned. CXi generates multiple reports on IVR performance, the Customer-IVR interactions, and sticking points in the IVR that cause customers to struggle. CXi’s IVR Analytics platform provides a comprehensive understanding of customer engagement. Pointel Customer Experience Insights (CXi) delivers actionable information that enables businesses to reduce customer effort, operational costs and increase contact center efficiency. This helps contact centers optimize employee engagement, operations, and customer experience.

20.)

PRILINK SIP-Trunk Demarc Monitor Analyzes SIP signalling and RTP audio stream of every call passing through the network demarcation point. Provide a real time 24/7/365 network baseline database that contains the IP bandwidth, call traffic of up to 128 voice groups, Call Detail Record (CDR), call blockage and MOS voice quality. All information are displayed in SIP-Trunk dashboards and are used in many applications, such as Telco collaboration, UC/CC analytics, Work Force Optimization (WFO) and caller identification.

 

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